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Content Marketing News & Analysis

Tasks crowd our working days. And as the pace of work accelerates, managers' expectations grow year after year. It's no wonder that people joke that the ultimate business technology would be a time machine.

While time travel would be neat and maybe even a little scary (as any science fiction fan would tell you), we’ve had time machines for years. They come in the form of the technologies that make us more productive and thus add time we can spend doing other things.

Native advertising hit its stride last year. “Paid posts,” which gained popularity on new media platforms like Buzzfeed and Business Insider, started popping up in venerable publishers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And big brands have jumped on these sponsored content opportunities, including Dell and Shell, who have both invested in the creation of native advertising units within The New York Times.

Marketers interested in learning about how technology can help with their content marketing efforts got a little help this week from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and ContentTECH 2015.

Hosted by CMI, ContentTECH is a one-day virtual conference, complete with live online sessions, a virtual exhibit hall, live chats, networking opportunities and even conference prizes.

Sessions and live chats covered topics such as developing unified strategies between marketing and technology, the role of content in delivering the customer experience and making sense of technology and humanity.

An ever-growing number of customers have the potential to engage with your company on digital channels in real time. You have only seconds to attract and engage these buyers. Most companies can’t ignore the need for top notch digital marketing -- and marketers must quickly gain proficiency for interacting with customers on digital channels.

Digital marketing isn’t that new. A whole lot of people have been publishing all kinds of useful content to help you understand, implement and measure digital marketing -- as well as how to strategize, connect to customers and support customer journeys through to purchases.

But many of you aren’t getting it -- why?

Or is it that you get it -- but the company that you work for doesn't provide a culture or infrastructure that supports marketing as a strategic function?

In the midst of the current digital marketing age continues a debate that seems as old as Gutenberg’s press: Is print dead?

While those who agree with this statement cite the benefits of digital, such as lower distribution costs, longer reach and convenience, among others, the pro-print camp seems to be getting more support these days.

Rockley, the president of The Rockley Group, author and online content delivery expert, told CMSWire marketers simply spend too much with content -- in the wrong places, and in the wrong ways.

"Marketers create good content," Rockley said, "but they spend an inordinate amount of time manually crafting different pieces of content for different channels and different audiences. They craft it for the Web, they craft it for mobile, they craft it for Facebook, they craft it for Twitter. They craft it for one vertical industry, they craft it for another. The content is all good but they spend way too much time hand-crafting it."

Behind every great piece of content marketing is a great content team.

That should be obvious, but for all the emphasis brands are placing on content marketing, surprisingly little is said about the teams that make it work. Surprising because while marketers are shifting more dollars toward content marketing, the sector is suffering from a huge staffing problem. Nearly half of all B2C marketers have dedicated content teams within their organizations, according to the latest annual trend report from the Content Marketing Institute (pdf). Yet the same report found that a third of the 5,000-plus marketers surveyed said they had trouble finding trained content marketing professionals.

So many good reasons to stream live video. So many ways to screw it up.

According to Forrester, video as an increasingly common channel for both internal communication with other employees and external communication with customers and partners. But longstanding worries over costs, technical hiccups, meticulous planning, expert staffing and other issues make many IT and corporate communications managers wince at the very idea of going live.

What if the CEO is ready, but the network isn't? What if everyone logs on at the same time? What if the videographer is sick that day? What if you record an event and then can't find it in the SharePoint archive?

In a CMSWire webinar yesterday, Brian Prigge, SharePoint architect and product manager for Ramp, explained why those pain points are disappearing, making it possible to launch live-streaming video events on the fly. The webinar, which was also sponsored by Ramp, was titled "Extending the Enterprise CMS with Live Video." You can watch it by clicking here or at the end of this story.

What would it be like to transport yourself immediately from your current destination to the destination of your choice? From Star Trek to Harry Potter, to the ancient tales of Aladdin, we've been captivated by the idea that we could somehow move time and space to be in another world.

Until we have the power to wrinkle our noses and teleport, we must be satisfied with photos, videos and Skype. But is it possible to spin a tale and immerse readers in a story without asking them to leave their desk, couch or bed? What if we could tell a story and transport a person from his current reality into the storyteller’s tale?

Enter multimedia long-form. Also called interactive long-form or multimedia narrative journalism, this innovative way of telling stories means that we can actually put our readers in the center of the story in a way that wasn't previously possible.

Congratulations. Your organization is moving down the digital transformation road with content and mobile strategies. There’s no turning back.

But are you exceeding audience expectations with a variety of digital, human and hybrid touches? If you’re unsure, your organization’s content engine -- or a more advanced stage known as a Culture of Content (CoC) -- might need oil or an overhaul.

The bar gets raised in the retail world every year. Research from Statista indicates that retail e-commerce sales figures in the United States during the 2014 holiday shopping season reached $53.3 billion -- that’s billion with a capital B.

It used to be enough to sell good products, maybe have a website that describes them and a good customer service center. But these days, you don’t really succeed unless you do all that plus reach people on a variety of devices including smartphones and tablets, and get them to sing your praises on a slew of social media sites.

Content has always been the primary focus of whatever setting and way it is to be used: novels are serial, broken only by chapters; non-fiction works are segmented by subject and accompanied by footnotes and references; work instructions are divided by processes, tasks and steps with references to parts, materials and commodities needed, and so on.

The content designer and creator always knew going in the role for the content being created. People --whatever their role -- have always been required to use the content as presented in order keep their job, succeed at their project or enjoy the story.

While it's true that some settings require content that can be used for multiple roles, this level of complexity is still confined to specific industries and settings.

Brick-and-mortar stores have an advantage over e-tailers when it comes to keeping customers engaged --it’s much harder for prospects to walk away from a face-to-face interaction than to click away from a website. In-store customers also go to greater lengths to shop there than online browsers, so they’re likely to be more receptive to immediate sales messages. E-commerce is clearly on the rise with growth estimates of 13.9 percent from Nov. 1, 2014 to Dec. 31, 2014 compared with the same period in 2013.

As someone who earns a living helping B2B marketers make social media work, I was surprised by a recent claim from Forrester Research. Marketers use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to engage customers and prospects, Forrester noted. But then it added: it’s not working.

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The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...